Drag racing, horse and buggy style

By: Drivers.com staff

Date: Friday, 31. August 2007

Drag racing forms an entire sub-culture of the driving milieu, much of it officially sanctioned and given great respectability as a serious sport through organizations such as the U.S. National Hot Rod Association or the Australian National Drag Racing Association.

It also has its darker side of well-organized underground groups challenging public authority with illegal races on public highways in the early hours--a dangerous activity respectable drag racers are quick to condemn. Also, as a quick browse of the Internet reveals, the sport is laced with heroes and flamboyant characters.

There's "Spiderman," for instance, self-proclaimed elder statesman of Top Fuel motorcycle drag racing, who received his nickname from his trademark style of "crawling" around on the bike to keep it in the groove. There's drag racing for electric cars, sponsored by the National Electric Drag Racing Association, and there's even drag racing for boats.

Undoubtedly, though, the most unusual kind of racing to reach the attention of Drivers.com appears to be taking place in Canada on the back roads of rural southwestern Ontario, in Mennonite country.

The Mennonites are a religious group who dress as though they just stepped out of the rural nineteenth century, though, in fact, they are not resistant to change. Their lives move more slowly than the rest of modern industrial society and they choose to examine change carefully before they accept it. If a new idea or gadget does not help to keep their lives simple and their families together, they probably will reject it.

As a result, many of them drive horses and buggies rather than cars, do not have electricity in their homes, and send their children to private, one-room schoolhouses.

Where does the drag racing come in?

Well, it seems as though boys act like boys among the Mennonites, too. According to the local newspaper, the Kitchener Waterloo Record , instead of tearing around in muscle cars, some teenage Mennonite boys occasionally drag race along country roads using the one means of locomotion available to them--the horse and buggy.

Their activities, in fact, have caused a local councilor to complain that a newly-paved road has been damaged by horses' hooves.

He recently spotted two teenagers "roaring down the road, side-by-side," driving chariot-style buggies. And another local, who conducts bicycle tours of the area, says that as a boy he raced with his Mennonite friends.

On Sundays, Mennonites often go to the home of a friend or relative where they sing and socialize. At these outings, teenage boys sometimes slip away and find a quiet country road for racing.

Sgt. Merv Knechtel, of the Waterloo regional police, says he's heard of drag racing, but his detachment has never received a complaint.

"Let's put it this way. I'm sure it does happen, but it hasn't been one of those problems that has ever really come to the police's attention," he said.

The general consensus is that most of the cases are isolated incidents and there's no real organization involved. After all, if a motorist did spot them and phoned the police to complain, the daredevil horse riders would have a heck of a job making a clean getaway.

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